But as it turned out, my first day went fine. I was told I’d have the week to lesson plan, so on Monday I came up with some topics I wanted to teach and got started on an “About me” powerpoint. I was feeling pretty good, but I definitely shouldn’t have been. Because when the 2nd day rolled around, I started to learn about some of those “endless possibilities.”
I got to school at my normal time and kept working on the curriculum. Then at 2:15, the head English teacher walked into the room looking pretty pissed off. He yelled something at the classroom assistant in Korean, reset the power to the room for some reason (deleting the “About me” presentation I’d been working on) and stormed out. The assistant looked at me.
“He said class start in five minutes,” she said.
“What?”
“I don’t understand,” she said. “He say you have one week to lesson plan, but now he say class start.”
She wasn’t the only one having trouble understanding. “All the classes? Today?” I asked.
She gave me a solemn nod, like she was diagnosing me with stage 4 cancer or something. “Yes,” she said.
I looked back at the computer, which was in the process of restarting. I don’t really have a “panic mode,” but this was probably as close as I’ve ever gotten to it. What the hell was I gonna do for the next three hours? Talk about myself without a powerpoint? There was a decent chance these kids wouldn’t understand anything without pictures to help. Hmm…maybe nametags. Yeah, nametags take thirty minutes, right? (If we're charting this by the five stages of grief model, I think I was in denial here). Somehow, though, I pulled myself back to a rational train of thought, and I remembered I had at least part of my presentation in my email. I opened that up and found an eight slide powerpoint that ended with “I don’t like cheese.” Really, I guess that’s as good a place to stop as any.
A couple minutes later, the students started trickling in. One girl came up to my desk and gave me a sideways stare. Then she reached out and began touching my hair. I wasn’t really sure what the protocol was on this, so I just sat still until she stopped. All in all, about five more girls came in, at which point the assistant said I could start. The girls sat down and mostly just stared at me with confused expressions. Then they began shouting out rapid-fire questions in Korean, which the assistant fielded. I stood there silently the whole time, no idea what was going on. I had a feeling this wouldn’t be the last time.
Anyway, I wasn’t really sure when to start, because more girls kept coming in every few minutes. But eventually I opened up my powerpoint and went for it. Surprisingly, even my abridged version took forever, as the students interrupted every few seconds with more questions (trust me, I was very thankful for this.) No joke, the class actually ended before we even had time to make nametags. So that wasn’t so bad. I’m not sure if they know any English, but at least they seem like good kids.
Then my 3rd and 4th graders came in. The first two kids to wander in were a boy and a girl. The girl immediately picked up a soccer ball and smashed the boy over the head with it. It didn’t take me long to realize that these kids were not going to be like my 1st and 2nd graders. About 15 of them filed in, and they were bouncing off the walls. They weren’t wearing shoes and the floor was wooden, so they all did that run-really-fast-and-slide-for-a-few-feet thing. Secretly, I wanted to join them, but I was an authority now.
“Hey, no running,” I shouted. “No running!”
I could tell they understood by their expressions. Of course, that didn’t stop them from completely ignoring me. Finally- with the help of the assistant- I was able to get them all to sit in their seats long enough to go through my powerpoint. They seemed halfway interested, but this time it didn’t even take ten minutes to finish. OK, that was fine, we still had to do nametags. I handed out a sheet of English names for them to choose from, and the kids started working on it. But I noticed that some of them had gotten a little…creative. One kid named himself “G.D.” Another named himself “RB bag.” (Was he going for Arby’s bag? I really don’t know.) Within ten minutes, they’d all finished, which meant they were back to punching each other and screaming and throwing paper airplanes. Just great.
I needed something to kill twenty minutes. Some kind of game, but what? I thought about all of my training during orientation, and of course I came up blank. What did I play as a kid? What games did I like?....uhhh…umm…Hangman! I went up to the whiteboard, drew the gallows, and said, “Pick letter. ABCDEFG…” I’m not sure if they’d played before, but they figured it out instantly. And that was how I spent the last twenty minutes of my class.
Last class: my 5th and 6th graders. One of the first girls to come in pointed at me, screamed “YOU CAME OUT OF THE TV!” and started running in circles. Every few seconds, she’d scream the same thing again. I could tell it was going to be a fun hour. About fifteen students came into this class, and it was more of the same: punching, slapping, screaming. Let me take a second to clear up a little misconception here. Before I left, a few different people told me something like, “Well, I bet these kids will be perfectly behaved.” Uh, no. For the most part, they’re psychotic. Adorable, but psychotic. Anyway, for the 5th and 6th graders, the powerpoint/nametag combo only lasted half the class, so I had another half to kill. What’d I do? What do you think? Hangman, of course. Hey, if it ain’t broke…
At about 5, the kids left and I was finally able to take a deep breath and reflect. What was I supposed to accomplish in my first day of teaching? Set up class rules? Nope. Assess their English proficiency? Not so much. 3rd-6th graders know the alphabet well enough to play Hangman. That’s about all I’ve got.
In the end, my voice was pretty much gone, and I was exhausted, and yet…I was still here. The kids had gotten through it, too. No tears were shed. Nobody died. Sure, there were technological problems, and yeah, the kids were a little bit insane. But spite of everything that went wrong, I actually had a pretty fun time. And I know it won’t be long before I get another shot at it.
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